Such a gesture expertly captured the spirit of her life. A passion for food coursed through her best work, from “Heartburn” to “Julie & Julia,” and had Hollywood never beckoned, Ms. Ephron probably could have carved out a career as a successful cookbook author.

“Nora never wanted to publish a cookbook, and she was approached about it often, actually,” J. J. Sacha, her longtime assistant, wrote in an e-mail Tuesday. But Ms. Ephron did compile a samizdat collection of her own recipes as a gift to her crew after wrapping up “Julie & Julia.” On Monday, pages from that book were disentangled from their spiral binding and passed along, recipe by recipe, to the 800 or so people who attended the memorial.

Ms. Ephron didn’t plan to publish the recipes, but we managed to come across one of them. It offers guidelines for making tsimmes, a traditional Jewish dish of stewed fruits and vegetables, and you can’t help but notice that Ms. Ephron, a deft humorist to the end, winked at how it’s “delicious with a pork roast.” JEFF GORDINIER

A version of this article appears in print on July 11, 2012, on page D10 of the New York edition with the headline: A Farewell to Nora Ephron, Dish by Dish. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe